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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25206922">numbers and silver threads</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavensabove/pseuds/heavensabove'>heavensabove</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>anika trevelyan &amp; her circumstances [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age Difference, Angst, F/M, May/December Relationship, Suggestions of smut, also dorian is here for a second, cw for mention of suicide</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:44:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,450</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25206922</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavensabove/pseuds/heavensabove</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Anika ran from nothingness and desperation. She’s glad that she found hunger and intent, that her first time had been laced with dark, crushing waves of pain, with the ache of lies pressing in like knife-points dulled by overuse.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Blackwall | Thom Rainier/Female Inquisitor, Blackwall | Thom Rainier/Female Trevelyan, Blackwall/Female Inquisitor, Blackwall/Female Trevelyan (Dragon Age)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>anika trevelyan &amp; her circumstances [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1749697</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>numbers and silver threads</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Cassandra had said that she doesn’t like that he is so much older than Anika. She doesn't understand.</p>
<p>Men Anika’s age take shape as vultures and wolves, as slithering snakes, as pigs in a pen. They aren’t attractive, but crawling, like tiny barbs on too many pointy legs. Their sweet words are hollow, their fingers sweaty and sticky leaving dark smudgy circles on her clothing. Rancid breaths too close over tavern chairs and in the spaces after dances.</p>
<p>Their hair, and their hairlessness. Too many solid colors: black, brown, hay colored, yellow like dandelions. Pink like uncooked fowl, or smooth dark like coffee grounds, or the milky browns of somewhere in between; naked, undistinguished.</p>
<p>Her beloved has two names. Anika stretches beside him under heavy covers. Her mouth forms two syllables and then says one. He reaches for her. He’s pale but there’s vigor running under every expanse of white skin. Dark and silver wiry hairs on his arm, a wondrous forest. She runs her fingers through it as she journeys to his shoulder.</p>
<p>From his shoulder, a line of scarred skin, and a thicket of hair so dark and curly, but similarly veined with silver; a path running from it, hairs narrowing until reaching his crotch, where again they blossom into a grove. A carefully drawn map, from one point of interest to another, from her sensitive breasts to her soft, bruised folds.</p>
<p>He fucks with intent. He fucks like he’s hungry. One of Anika’s friends went to a picnic with a boy of twenty, and beneath the canopy of a tree, let him fuck her. It was her first time letting someone fuck her.</p>
<p><em> How did it feel? </em> Anika had asked.</p>
<p><em> Like nothing. </em> Her friend had said.</p>
<p>A few days later, her friend reconsidered and said maybe it had felt like desperation too.</p>
<p>Anika ran from nothingness and desperation. She’s glad that she found hunger and intent, that her first time had been laced with dark, crushing waves of pain, with the ache of lies pressing in like knife-points dulled by overuse. That she’ll never forget it, unlike her friend who struggled to recall details such as names and features after six months.</p>
<p>“She was the seamstress’ daughter.” He says. “I thought I loved her. I thought I would marry her.”</p>
<p>Her friend’s faded memory had returned with a clearer grasp of details. He remembered her name and the way she had felt. It was not love, but the desire to capture and keep, if not the person then the record of conquering the person.</p>
<p>There’s a girl he met at some tourney. A barmaid. Another barmaid. Noblewomen with curious eyes and hands. Elven servants he had treated with humanity. An older woman who had let him stay the night during his mercenary days - he had cried on the road after he left her.</p>
<p>Women who had withstood and absorbed his youth and nothingness and desperation and given Anika the grave, leonine, ravenous man. How grateful she is to them! How she prays to the Maker that endless rewards be given to them, for they have given her everything she could’ve wanted in life.</p>
<p>“I was wrong. Love isn’t anything I’ve felt until I met you.” He says, his breath hot against her cheek, warm evidence of his love trickling down her thighs.</p>
<p>“He’ll die before you, you know.” Dorian says. “Let’s consider that we all survive our daily brushes with death long enough to reach old age — still, he’ll die before you.”</p>
<p>He was the age she was when they first met the day she was born - twenty three. Twenty three multiplied twice. He had lived a life, and then they had both lived her lifetime separately until one clear morning in the Hinterlands they had begun living it together.</p>
<p>One day he will reach death, like he had reached life, before her. She will live the rest of her life completely alone.</p>
<p>She had heard of a family somewhere in Ferelden, where when husbands passed their widows consumed poison and staggered to their pyres. The bystanders would watch holding their breaths as the widows swayed and clutched their stomachs and white foam gathered at their mouths. Then, upon expiration, they would haul the brides made new onto the pyres, marry them back into flames.</p>
<p>The day Dorian says that to her, Anika mentions the family’s practices to him.</p>
<p>He stops just as he’s mounted her, throat working, eyes shadowed.</p>
<p>“Swear on me that you won’t do it.” He says. “Swear that you’ll live.”</p>
<p>She cries because she can’t lie. She won’t know until she reaches that point whether her mind will direct her towards life or his pyre. That night he cries too as he fucks her, as if the full impact of this disparity in years has struck him for the first time.</p>
<p>“But…” She says after it’s over, as their sweat stains the sheets in their outlines. “What if I die before you?” A stray arrow, a sword not dodged fast enough, jagged teeth allowed too close to the throat. Anything can kill her. Anything including the thing that’s carved permanently into her left hand. Anything like the thing that had gotten her mother’s childhood friend at thirty, starting in her womb and spreading throughout her body.</p>
<p>He blinks at her in shock.</p>
<p>“You will live, won’t you?” She asks. “You’ll live your life without me.”</p>
<p>He remains silent and in that silence she can see him. In a room, empty. His sword in his hands. Eyes glazed. How dare him extract promises from her he himself won’t keep?</p>
<p>Anger comes but doesn’t last. Equal in age, she could’ve held onto it, but she feels demure because he’s seen, done, lost so much more. Her life had contours before while his was a vast shapeless desert pluming out from ruins. Where they met, a spring, structures, shade from the heat. Where she begins, meaning; where she ends, a chasm.</p>
<p>She knows and is touched and the horror of dying becomes sharper. Mortality is a punishment and those who have never feared death might as well die because they’ve never lived. What courage? What valor?</p>
<p>“I had forgotten what it meant to fear it.” He says. “Maker, I’ve never wanted so much to live.”</p>
<p>He pulls her close and wraps himself around her, folding her within him. In this way, they become timeless. He whispers apologies into her ear and weaves lovely what-ifs.</p>
<p>
  <em> he’s thom, a carpenter’s son and she’s anika, the seamstress’ daughter. they meet at five and play hide and seek. you’re it. no, you. clamber up into the loft. hay glittering like gold floating in the air. their innocent games and innocent laughter. ten. fifteen. not innocent anymore. his eager lips on hers, sweaty palms under thin dress. long dark hair on the hay. eyes like suns eclipsed, edged in gold. </em>
</p>
<p>What was he like as a teenager? Anika was quiet in front of strangers but rambunctious with those she trusted. Traipsing all over, feet dirty and bloody. She didn’t like boys other than her brothers. Boys couldn’t come close because of them.</p>
<p>And another one—</p>
<p>
  <em> she is a noblewoman indeed and he is a captain in the orlesian army. he’s known to chase girls. she catches his eye across the dance floor. different somehow. he rescues her from a sweaty, trembling nobleman. dance like water gliding over smooth stone; how perfectly they entwine, like Lovers’ Knots. her parents don’t even notice she’s gone. her innocence coaxed away under the shadow of a fountain. he promises to keep her forever. </em>
</p>
<p>Anika guesses that this is her a year before the Conclave but him more than a decade before. The Maker, only, breaks and joins the lines of time, and He does so with purpose. She would’ve hated this man because men who treat women as playthings repulse her and men who enjoy the inanity of ballrooms repulse her. She would have rejected this man without a second thought.</p>
<p>“I have one.” Her voice soft in the crevice of his neck.</p>
<p>
  <em> thom is lying but his heart is cleaner than it ever has been. pierced by splinters of memories and deeds. he fights without restraint for utter strangers. anika, thrown from one life into another, hand burning endlessly, stumbling here to there; Herald! Savior! she runs down a bridge. an arrow nearly takes her from earth, but thom shields her and he will shield her like this for years and years. false is the name he tells her but he is true and he is what he gives to her. </em>
</p>
<p>The end.</p>
<p>“That’s it?” He breathes.</p>
<p>“That’s it.” She says, fingering silver strands.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>It was high time for me to stop normal-writing and start weird-writing. Also to meditate on the age difference between my Inquisitor and Blackwall.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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